At last…I am back on-line! (Only away for like 7 months, except for a few brief visits using other computers). Hopefully my "nightmare" is over and I can move on with my life. I moved into a nice small 1 bedroom apt. closer to work. No propeerty taxes, no water bills, gas included, 12 minutes to work instead of like 28 on the freeway…etc. All around a perfect place for me.

The move was a pain of course. Took 3 days off and had 2 days for the weekend for 5 days of moving all the junk out of my old place to be picked up by the garbage men, or taking what few things I would save to be moved here. About 30 to 35 of those 30 gallon garbage bags all stacked up in my back yard, couch, tables, other furnature, on and on, all to be junked. All 5 days were solid moving stuff here or junking the rest…then back to work! =P

In the time before my move (No phone, no T.V. , no internet…not a single luxury…..Gilligans Island theme plays on)…I wasted a good chunk of my time with DVDs I special ordered…an old kids saturday morning T.V. show from the 70's called Land of the Lost. (Not the remake serries they tried arround the early 90's).

I did have a T.V, later on but I waited to buy one. My other one fried out on me around January I think it was.

Had a red screen for like 3-5 minutes before the picture would finally "pop in" normal. After a while it would not turn on at all.

So what is "Land of the Lost"? Like I said…it was geared towards kids. Was my favorite show back then…I was like 5 to 8 years old when it first ran. The scripts are written in a way towards kids for language and stuff, but the Sci-Fi elements had many of the parents watching the show with thier kids. All sorts of wierd and cool things were possible in the show.

It's hard to nail down as many of the shows had thier own twist that much of them tied together in other episodes. The basic idea is that a ranger named Rick Marshall takes his two kids on a raft trip down a river. Durring thier trip and earthquake happens and the river gets more rapid untill the go over a waterfall….but they never hit bottom. Instead they fall into a hole in space…a dimentional dorway into the Land of the Lost. A wierd closed universe populated by various dinosaurs, lizard type creatures called sleestack, and other characters as time goes on. The Zarn, a being made of light that turns red when arround human emotion, Pakuni, little ape like people that are sort of like a missing link. (And no, I am not one of them…but there is an actuall Pakuni language that was developed for the show…so it is possible to figure out what they are saying if you pay close attention). A creature lives in a pit of fog in the lost city where the Sleestack dwell…but you never see it, you only hear it. The sleestack worship it as thier god.

And now some other cool thing you will find in the Land of the Lost….

Top left-Chaka is reminded by Big Alice about the high price of eggs these days.

Top Right-Grumpy eyes up a pylon the kids jumped into. Pylons are a strange metalic pyramid-ish that do all sorts of strange things. They generally have a matrix table of crystalls in most of them. A pyramid shaped key on the outside is turned (on most of them) to open them up. Turn the key and a section on the front just vanishes allowing entry. Some pylons have no key and only open when the 3 moons line up in the sky a certain way. Some of the pylons control the weather, others can open dimentional doorways to other times and worlds, there are 2 clock pylons which control the time in the sky..meaning the sun could be stuck in the sky forever or it could be eternal night if they are played with, another controls the behavior of the sun which can cause solar flares and such. Another can turn you invisible for a time if you enter it. Another is the time regulator that allows the person to run time forward of backward effecting everything outside of it.

In the bottom pictures however the kids have discovered a weather pylon. By touching the crytals they manage to cause lightning storms, red and dark blue skys, hail, huricane type winds…

Pylons are also strange as they are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside.

In the pics on the top this time we see Enik with Will Marshall in the lost city trying to open a dimentional doorway back to his time to warn his people. Enik is an Altrusian. At first he thought he went back in time thru a doorway and the sleestack were his kind from the past. Instead he discovers from the Marshalls that his city is in ruins and the sleestack are his barbaric decendants who de-evolved into warlike stupid creatures and let his world go to hell in a handbasket.

The bottom pictures show the sleestack. The ones on the left are from the original 70's T.V. series. The last picture shows what the sleestack are supposed to look like in the new Land of the Lost movie that is supposedly being worked on. The release date is supposed to be like Summer of 2009. I hope they don't blow it…there are just too many cool elements for a good Sci-Fi movie with this stuff. I guess the people who actually played the sleestack in the original series were all UCLA basketball players if I remember right.

What else is cool in the show? Remeber the glowing crytals on the matrix tables? Well the crytalls can also do things when they are combined by themselves. The shows did screw up some of the proper combinations I think but some examples are…

Combining a blue crystal with a green one will make a temporary invisible force field shocking anything that touches it.

Trying to remeber some other ones for the right colors…. Red and blue mixed with a yellow will give you a paralizing electric shock if touched.

I think Red and green make light. Add a yellow and it will create a giant flash of light that doesn't last long.

Red and Yellow…I think make an explosion.

Other interesting stuff… Like I said, the Land of the Lost is a "closed universe". When the Marshalls climb a mountain and look thru a pair of binoculars they see people on another mountain far away. But looking closer they realize they are actually seeing THEMSELVES from the back…like looking all the way around the world and seeing yourself from behind. There is a river that runs in a circle all the way around the Land of the Lost…complete with waterfall defying physics. One of the pylons is like a "subway car" in a sense that the door opens and closes…but each time it opens again it takes you to alternate type Land of the Losts or even back home.

Season 1 and 2 had many of the better episodes. Season 3 is pretty much the worst. There are still a couple decent ones in season 3…Aftershock, Timestop, Cornered (with Torchy the Dimetridon who breathes fire). Repairman was OK. But the worst episode by far had to be Aboinable Snowman!Hard to stomach watching that one. Medusa and Survival Kit were pretty lame as well. Well in Season 3 at least Rick Marshall "gets out" of the Land of the Lost using a pylon. Uncle Jack falls in the same way they got in at the same time. Lulu was a kinda cool creature as well…like a 2 headed Loch Ness monster that lived in the swamp.

Episodes I liked from seasons 1 and 2 were Skylons, The Stranger, Elsewhen, Huricane, Circle, The Test. Gravity Storm, The Pylon Express, Split Personality, and Black Out.

If you try to watch this stuff, remember….this was really a Saturday morning "KIDS" T.V. show. Which means…you know they are not going to have anybody die in the episodes. (Well, Spot does get caught by Grumpy in Skylons but nothing to grusome.) The dialog and acting is….well, overacted. They can only really "threaten violence". You are not going to see blood and guts or deadly weapons. And the budget…it was a pretty high budget for a kids show back then, but they did have to cut corners…meaning they use alot of the same dinosaur shots over and over because it was so expensive to make. Dinosaurs are all put in with that chroma-key stuff into the scenes and have that "jerk-o-rama look to them"….hey, Jurassic Park wasn't going to be around for another 20 years! The rubber pupet head shots were quite noticeable as well when the shots changed. I think they must have lost the Grumpy head in a fire from the first 2 seasons, because they use the wrong head at times in the 3rd season.

Well, dinosaurs, pylons, matrix tables, crystals, dimentional doorways….I hope they don't screw up the 2009 movie that is hopefully still in the works. Too many cool ideas that should not go to waste. Take care evrybody. =)